Why Speed Matters

Better Revenue

Site speed and reliability dictate how many visits you can get. Whether your site produces money through leads, online sales, or ad revenue, more visitors equals more money.

Decreased Abandonment

If you’ve ever had to wait in line at your local grocery store, you’ll understand why customers hate slow websites. Every second you shave off your load times can increase your conversions by up to 7%.

Lower Hosting Costs

Fast, efficient websites put less stress on their servers. Handling more customers without needing a server upgrade means less money spent on unnecessary upgrades to keep up with demand.

Fewer Random Problems

If you’ve ever dealt with phantom website problems, you know how an overloaded website can hurt business. But if your site can handle handle more traffic with less effort, those problems disappear.

Lower Bounce Rate

Studies show that up to 40% of visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Once your site improves to a 3 second load speed, you can expect to keep that 40% on your site.

Better Security

A site that can handle more traffic can also better withstand a spam or DOS attack. While you’ll still have hackers and spammers to deal with, your site will operate more smoothly when they attack.

Better Customer Satisfaction

Even a single-second delay (just 1 second more than the “perfect” 2 second speed), decreases customer satisfaction by 16% – the closer you are to that 2 second mark, the better your user experience.

Better Visitor Retention

79% of online shoppers say they are unlikely to revisit a slow website. If you have an e-commerce site, a few seconds of delay could mean a substantial loss of future revenue from repeat sales.

Better Search Ranking

Even Google favors fast sites in its search results (since April 2010). Improving your site speed improves site traffic, site ranking, conversion, and returning traffic – a marketer’s perfect storm.

The Cost of Slow

A one second speed delay is all it takes to drop your conversions by 7%. For sites that average only 100 sales per month at $100 per sale, that’s $753 in lost sales EVERY month.

FAQs

When do I need this?

When it comes to site speed, a better question might be “when don’t I need this?” Study after study has shown that every major online sales and marketing metric is impacted directly by site speed. Site stability, uptime, and speed all impact conversion rates, abandonment rates, ad click throughs, and overall customer satisfaction. The general expectation most visitors have is that your site will load in 2 seconds or less. Consequently, most studies suggest that for sites that take over 2 seconds to load, you can expect a 4-7% per second conversion or ad revenue loss for EVERY second it takes to load your site. And that’s just for desktop/laptop users. If the majority of your site traffic comes from mobile devices, those numbers go up from there. And that is exactly why Google now considers both page load speed and a site’s appropriateness for mobile devices when ranking your site against other search results.

If you’re trying to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of your WordPress install without having to change your hosting infrastructure or recode your site’s themes and plugins, an Advanced Optimization will do just that. If you suspect that your hosting infrastructure is also part of the problem, a Total Optimization is more tailored to that purpose – whether you’re looking to switch your hosting or just optimize the dedicated hosting setup you have now.

How will this affect my site speed and stability?

Regardless of the optimization type you buy, you will definitely notice an immediate improvement in load times and stability once one is complete. For most businesses, the Advanced Optimization is the right fit or is at least the best place to start. Since they are designed to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of your existing WordPress and hosting setup, they touch on every major part of the site that impacts its speed. And because of that, they’re ideal for every type of WordPress site – which is exactly why they are our most popular optimization package.

Ultimately though, WordPress can only move as fast as the hosting infrastructure it is on. So whether your hosting setup is a 4 lane highway or an 8 lane highway, if only 2 lanes are open, your visitors will still be waiting in traffic for the site to load. If you suspect that your hosting infrastructure is also part of the problem or you have a dedicated hosting environment that you can control, our Total Optimization packages are designed to address that problem as well.

For even more advanced slowness problems, we do also have custom caching solutions beyond our Total Optimizations for qualified sites.

How do the different optimization packages differ?

Advanced Optimizations are our most popular package because they’re designed to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of your site without having to recode it or change your hosting infrastructure. If you have the budget and desire to do that, but are married to your existing hosting infrastructure then it’s the right fit for your situation – regardless of whether your site is just a small business site, blog, or something more complex like an e-commerce site.

The Basic Optimization is usually best suited to very simple, small, low traffic personal or business sites that just need to get a bit more mileage out of their hosting. Whereas our more advanced optimization packages focus on things like database, JavaScript, and server configurations and on more aggressive caching and WordPress configurations, the Basic Optimization is strictly a focus on the bare minimum caching and configuration needed to take the edge off of a slow loading website. That is exactly what makes the Basic Optimization so suitable to smaller sites.

Total Optimizations are designed to eliminate every roadblock your site has to improving its site speed short of rebuilding some portion of your site. If you have a dedicated server/VPS or are willing to switch to a more speed optimized web host to solve the problem, then a Total Optimization is designed to handle just that and is the ideal choice for very high traffic or very complex websites.

How fast will my site be once this is done?

As a benchmark, we always aim to achieve a 2-3s minimum site load time even with our Basic Optimizations, but 3rd party factors like poor quality hosting or third party JavaScripts can definitely impact that. Ultimately, our optimizations are designed to help your site tap into the resources that it has. So if the hosting offers it little in the way of resources, the impact of that poor hosting will be more noticeable. As an example, it is not out of the ordinary for a boosted site to take 4 seconds to load on a poor quality host and only 1 second to load on a higher quality host, while a non-boosted site might run equally slow on both hosts. That’s why ultimately if you’re looking to get the most speed out of your site, you will have to keep an open mind with your hosting and other 3rd party providers. And, of course, if you’re trying to max out your site’s speed and you have your own dedicated server or are willing to change your hosting infrastructure, then you may want to consider a Total Optimization which is more tailored for that purpose.

Will this make my site as fast as it can be?

That depends on which plan you purchaes. Advanced Optimizations are designed to make your site as fast as it can be WITHOUT changing your hosting infrastructure or recoding parts of your site. So if you’re married to your current hosting infrastructure and it is not providing adequate horsepower to your WordPress site, then yes this package would offer the best you are going to get. But if you’re trying to squeeze every ounce of speed out of your site and you are open to changing whatever parts of your infrastructure may need to change, our Total Optimization package is better designed to do just that.

Ultimately, though, the site can only become as fast as our optimization pros are permitted to make it. If you decide to refrain from a particular optimization technique for some reason and our optimization experts can’t apply that optimization, it will artificially keep your site slower than it would be if we were allowed to do that optimization. So optimization is definitely a team effort.

Will my site get A grades for every score on speed testing sites?

Maybe. But you shouldn’t expect that and it’s definitely not a good idea to consider A grades a good thing. Popular speed testing reports are known for requesting impossible changes or changes to software or websites that you do not control. They’re also known for being a bit behind the technology curve on what is the “right” type of speed optimization to use for modern websites. One ironic example is that Google PageSpeed has been known to occasionally request changes to code in Google’s own services (like Google Analytics). Obviously you can’t change something that you can’t control. Another ironic example is that if you run speed tests on many of the most successful sites in the world, they too flunk the in A-F grades – even if their sites are actually very fast.

Ultimately, what matters is the actual speed of the site. If your site receives an F grade on some particular speed score, but it loads in 1 second (considered better than perfect) it doesn’t particularly matter that you have an F grade for that score. Since we are vehemently against harming our customer’s business interests by making changes that only have theoretically beneficial impacts (despite their very real world consequences), we focus our efforts instead on the actual site speed you can clock with a stopwatch. That has been tested and proven to be the only metric that improves a site’s overall marketing and performance health.

Do you fix all issues reported in speed testing reports?

That depends. Some speed suggestions that come back in website speed reports are just wrong. Others focus on small issues with speed that might improve a site’s speed by one-tenth of a second while ignoring issues that are causing 10s delays. Others are recommendations for other people’s websites or things you can not control. And still others can be suggestions that are 100% technically accurate but that will absolutely break your site if they are applied. Our speed experts consider all of this and apply the optimization fixes that will:

Have an impact

Last beyond 30 days out from our work

Keep the site stable

Prevent the site from breaking because of the change

Can you optimize WooCommerce sites?

Yes. E-commerce sites like WooCommerce, forums, blogs w/ comments, high traffic sites, custom sites, and other more interactive sites all require more processing power in order to function as expected. As an example, a very common complaint amongst e-commerce site owners is that the checkout page is slow. Given that the site has to process a credit card, complete an order, calculate shipping/taxes, and more – often for several customers at one time – the checkout page is already geared to be slower than other pages. But when you take a site that is configured with stock WordPress settings and put the weight of e-commerce behind it, you typically find that the checkout page is also being artificially slowed by all kinds of misconfigurations – often the sort that you will never see in a speed report from major vendors like GT Metrix or Pingdom. And if you’re using a dedicated server, VPS server, or low quality hosting on top of that, you can couple that slowdown with either stock server settings (and their slowdowns) or with just insufficient horsepower for the site to operate smoothly. Ultimately when your checkout page is slow, you can more readily feel the tie between speed and conversion than you can with any other type of site. That’s why Advanced and Total Optimizations are specifically designed to handle those sorts of problems.

Can you handle high traffic sites with complex infrastructures like CDNs, load balancers, WAFs, and reverse proxies?

Yes, absolutely. But sites with this type of architecture really only tend to gain from the optimizations that we provide as part of our Total Optimization package.

What kind of reporting do you provide?

Currently we provide before and after reports from major speed test providers to show the scope of the improvement. But for most site owners the results are noticeable even without reports – which is the point of the optimization after all.

Do you provide ongoing marketing help?

Our specialties lie in website speed, security, stability, and hosting. Since marketing is a more encompassing concern, we leave the marketing expertise to the marketing professionals just as the best marketing professionals leave the optimization and hosting expertise to the hosting/optimization professionals. As a general rule of thumb, good marketing firms don’t make good speed optimization/hosting firms and good WordPress speed/hosting firms don’t make good marketing firms. If you’re interest is to speed up your WordPress site instead of becoming vendor locked with a marketing firm’s hosting, co-opted into long term marketing contracts, or provided with sub-par website speed improvements, you’ll want to work with a speed optimization team instead of a marketing team for your WordPress speed needs.

What speed optimization package should I buy for a WooCommerce site?

We recommend starting with an Advanced Optimization for WooCommerce sites. If your site shows an indication that it will benefit from more substantial optimization efforts during our testing, we can always upgrade you to a Total Optimization later if that is appropriate.

Do you work with WordPress optimized web hosts?

Yes. We can work with most WordPress optimized web hosts. The Advanced Optimization is the right package to buy if you know you have a WordPress optimized web host.

What information do you need to optimize my site speed?

We need the hosting login and WordPress admin login at the least as we will need to edit files, databases, and elements of WordPress itself. If you order a Total Optimization and need us to optimize your server as well, we will also need root level or sudo capable access to your server as well.

How long does an optimization take?

Optimizations usually take 2-5 business days depending on the type of optimization you order and the unique speed issues in your website.

Can you help us switch hosting?

Yes. Our Total Optimization package includes the option to switch hosting providers if your current hosting provider is part of the problem. As an alternative, we do also offer standalone hosting migration as a completely managed service including site migration and DNS change management.

Do you optimize images?

Yes. Both the Advanced and Total Optimization packages do include image optimization as part of the service.

Do you lazy load images and videos?

Yes. Both the Advanced and Total Optimization packages do include image, vidoe, and iframe lazy loading as part of the service.

Do you optimize our database?

Yes. Both the Advanced and Total Optimization packages do include database optimization as part of the service.

Unlike other speed optimization services, we don’t simply clean junk out of the database. We also optimize the queries that run through the database to reduce load and optimize for cacheability and we also apply speed related architectural changes like appropriate database indexes to ensure the fastest database interaction.

Do you defer JavaScript?

Yes. Both the Advanced and Total Optimization packages do include JavaScript deferral as part of the process for sites that are compatible with the technique.

Do you audit our WordPress plugins?

Yes. WordPress plugin choices are not as global of a problem as it’s popularly believed, but if we do spot known slow plugins during our review of your site, we will tell you as much and recommend a course of action.

Do you work with custom themes and plugins?

Yes we do. But bear in mind that the more custom a site is, the more custom its optimizations often must be as well.

Do your plans include recoding themes or plugins?

No, but we do often have to do that for more complex or custom sites. If your site has some sort of artificial speed limit imposed by the way that the theme or a plugin is coded, we can provide you with a quote to address that separately from the main optimizations that we do for you upon your request.

Do your optimizations work with mobile devices?

Yes. Our speed optimizations work the same across all platforms. Bear in mind that some speed testing sites will recommend that you make your site responsive as part of a speed optimization and while that is definitely a great idea, it’s something that is a larger undertaking than just speeding up your site. That said, if you do need help making your site responsive, we do offer assistance with that as a standalone service and can provide you with a quote specific to your site upon request.

Yes. While converting a site to a responsive design for the purposes of improving the mobile experience is crucial to all modern sites, it’s a completely custom endeavor that is unique to each site. If you need help making your site responsive, just let us know and we can provide you with a quote that is unique to your site.

Are there side effects I should be aware of?

None that are permanent. Finding the right fit for the optimizations that are appropriate for your site may take a little bit of trial and error, but they are relatively quick and painless to address and once they have been addressed are permanently fixed.

Should I expect down time?

While it’s always a good idea to plan for down time when making more substantial changes to your site like this, in practice very few sites ever incur down time with the type of changes that we make to them.

What if my site is not just a WordPress install? Can you still help?

Yes. Improving the speed of WordPress will often improve the speed of the rest of your site too. If you have this type of setup, an Advanced or Total Optimization is the closest fit for your scenario. Advanced Optimizations focus strictly on WordPress and shouldn’t be expected to have as dramatic of an affect on other parts of the site. Total Optimizations do include server or hosting optimizations so those do tend to more noticeably impact non-WordPress parts of the site. Ultimately if you are having problems with the speed of something that is completely outside of WordPress, though, special attention needs to be given to just that. In special cases we do extend support to those non-WP areas of the site and if you would like to discuss that possibility with us, just contact us so we can discuss directly.